Have A Happy Human Life
by daniel-gillies-manpurse
Summary: Lying on the floor, in a puddle of tumbling brunette locks, shiny metallic eyes and deep red lips, she truly looks like an angel. He hears the faint thump of her heart inside her tiny body and he lifts her into his arms and carries her against his chest directly into the sunset. Or, Katherine has a human life and Elijah watches from the shadows.
1. Chapter 1

Lying on the floor, in a puddle of tumbling brunette locks, shiny metallic eyes and deep red lips, she truly looks like an angel. He hears the faint thump of her heart inside her tiny body and he lifts her into his arms and carries her against his chest directly into the sunset.

He doesn't use his speed or unnatural strength, he just carries on walking, walking. Savouring the scent of vanilla and lavender, savouring the texture of her soft brown curls and the sound of her beating heart. He knows he'll protect her no matter what.

He's lived too long putting his family first, and it's like Rebekah said. They're not a family, not really. They're just three individuals who happen to share a bloodline, and with Mikael gone, he can't even protect his sister anymore. There's no one to protect her _from._ They are truly immortal.

He reaches the cottage he bought years ago. It's just outside of Virginia, and it's small and cosy and made from stone with pink climbing roses that climb the walls and white roses that line the window sills with a big red door with a black knocker. It's their home, even if she wakes and doesn't want it.

He walks past the roaring fire and up the creaky stairs, all the while , listening to the faint beat of her heart as it slowly gets stronger.

He places her on the Egyptian cotton sheets in an all white room, and her head tilts to one side. His fingers find a loose curl and tucks it behind her ears. His hands find her feet (still placed in those tall little shoes she loves to wear) and pull them off her feet.

She makes a sound, a cross between sigh and sleepy moan, and he wishes she never had to wake. He wishes she'll open those big chocolate eyes one last time and go back to sleep, because her shoulders are weighed down with over half a millennia of torture, manipulation and running, and although she is something, a human mind will simply never be able to hold all that.

He makes to exit the room when her fingers find his and pulls him back to the bed. He awkwardly lies against the bed and she snuggles closer to his chest and wraps her other hand inside his jacket.

It's then he realises that half a millennia of manipulation, torture and running will destroy a human mind, even if it is hers. She starts to murmur on his chest and her eyes flutter open and a shriek escapes her mouth.

It's so... so unlike both Katherine and Katarina that he knows she's losing her mind, and he has two options. He could either turn her, right here, right now, and pretend this never happened.

Or... he could compel everything away. He could destroy it all.

Elena, The Salvatore Brothers, the curse, his brother, the lies, the death, the murder, the blood

Him.

His fingers hold her face and she begs him not to, calls him a coward, spits in his face

"You wouldn't dare Elijah! Remember... all the fun we used to have? It doesn't have to change."

But he does. He compels it all away.

He finds a nice village in England, a small, under populated everybody knows everything about everybody type English Village, and he buys her a cottage that mirrors theirs. He finds an elderly woman who he compels to be her mother, a businessman he compels to give her a job, and a blonde airhead he compels to be her friend.

He compels the entire village for her. He compels them to remember that she was a sweet little girl that loved to play games in the play ground but never told anyone the rules. He compels them to remember that she was an intelligent and beautiful little girl with a string of admirers wherever she went.

He watches the village, protects it. Niklaus finds it one day and Elijah stabs him with the white oak dagger. Of course, it does no damage to him, but the anger in Elijah's eyes make him wait for the next doppelganger.

Katherine dies alone, old and happy. Alone, because he ever let anyone get near her. Old, because humans don't stay young and beautiful forever. Happy, because in her old age she told stories of a man she loved centuries ago who always wore suits and who didn't believe in love yet would do anything for her (except deny his brother). She saw him once, she says, and he smiled at her.

She dies, and he finds her head stone. It's elegant and understated (she'd hate it. She'd want bold and dramatic) and he closes his eyes and lies next to her, imaging her not as the old lady, but as Katarina, his Katarina, and pretends he feels her hand inside of his. He closes his eyes and waits until his blood dries in his veins and his body turns to ash, right next to her.

**A/N I might do a follow up of this where in Katherine remembers Elijah and why she never married or had children but only if you want me too. Please review (means a lot!) and also please look at my other stories (Klaroline/Kaleijah/Stelena/Jenna/Lexi)**


	2. Chapter 2

If he thought she didn't notice then, well, he was as stupid as she always thought he was. Stupid, because he chose family over love, stupid, because his family were strangers and she was his lover.

She knows he watches her, and she finds it annoying at first. She hates how he's compelled her all these friends (and the blonde Barbie is obviously a tribute to Caroline, it's so transparent he's modelling her life on Elena's) and parents, that he's found her a job and a house and how he transfers money into her account every month as if she's as stupid as him.

She remembers everything. The cottage, their cottage, and how he thought he did it for her. He didn't. They were both miserable.

Every Christmas, a bottle of the perfume she wore when she was immortal is left on her door step with a "from your admirer" gift tag. As if she didn't know it was him, when the perfume was full of vervain.

Vervain, that's how she remembers. You can't compel a vampire on vervain, and not a day passed she didn't slip it into her tea.

Every Christmas, every night, she walks home and thinks, hopes, he'll be on her porch waiting for her with an apology and a goblet of his blood so she can die again and be her and so that they can live together forever, happy and immortal.

She's lonely. Compelled friends are useless, and sometimes she wishes she didn't slip vervain in her tea so that she could have been compelled and maybe believed all this.

Over time, her perfect skin creases like crumpled paper, her hips lose their seductive sway and her chocolate hair turns gray. She screams and cries when she finds her first grey hair because it's dawning on her that he's _not _going to save her. It's then she see's Niklaus and she wants to beg him to do it, but he leaves quickly and she doesn't have the chance.

She flirts, flirts outrageously and like never before. She has a string of male friends (if you know what she means) but they never have chance to steal a kiss yet alone be her lover before they mysteriously vanish and then return and not remember a thing about her.

In time, she begins to hate him. She begins to loathe him and how he left her and how he obviously cared nothing for her because she hasn't seen him looking after the village (and in _England?_ Why couldn't he put her in her beloved Bulgaria or Vegas?) and then, that Christmas, she see's him place the perfume on her porch, just one glance and he turns and looks at her and smiles and leaves.

It's a tragedy, she decides, that they can't be together.

Then she starts to lose her memory and she's placed into a nursing home because she has no family now the old woman has died, no husband and no children, and she starts to dream in the day and in the night about a man who always wore suits and who had funny hair and who didn't believe in love and yet loved _her._

She starts to love him and wants to tell him she knows he' there but it she spoke it would make no difference because it' too late now, anyway.

She hates Elena. Now sweet, little , innocent Elena has (not only the Salvatore Brothers) but Elijah at her company, because he'll love her just because she reminds him of her. She hates that Elena first stole her human life and then her immortality and yet somehow she is still the bad doppelganger that they all hate.

She sinks further into her dreams and pretends the Home is their cottage, the one with white sheets and a roaring fire and him and her and cuddles in the morning (and she's way too badass to even be imagining cuddles in the morning and yet she does).

She gets a letter from Damon the day she dies. He's given her a vial of blood because if anything they share in common, it's their distaste for human life. She feels something twist inside of her because he knew where she was all this time and let her get to this ... frail old nothing of a woman before he even contemplated giving her what she had so kindly given to him. She hates him. She wonders if Stefan knew where she was.

She goes back to bed and pulls the cover over her head and sinks back into their cottage and then it's over. Human lives are so short and so inconsequential and she left no kind of legacy, to anyone.

Except to him, but that doesn't matter. Her last words are not "I love you" or "I know your there" or anything sweet, kind, loving or romantic in any way. In fact, it' a short snap at her nurse to get her a new catheter because this one's full.

She doesn't know she's going to die, but she wants it. After she got to the age when immortality was pointless, she waited to die. This is the conclusion to five hundred years of nothing. Of running, lies and manipulation and living out of a suitcase (which was still better than this) with her only legacy being Elijah's memory of her and the Salvatore's memory.

**A/N If you want I don't mind doing a chapter on the Salvatore's checking in on Katherine and why Damon sent her his blood, but I think this is finished. You'll have to review and tell me (not bribery at ****_all)_**** but if this is finished then thankyou for the favourite's and if your a Kaleijah shipper then you might (might) like the man who couldn't trust and That's My Game.**


End file.
